1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. More specifically it relates to the development and deployment of RFID-enabled software applications in a networked computer environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
With its numerous potential advantages of low cost, convenience, flexibility and massive scalability from deployment through operation, the RFID technology is enjoying tremendous growth of acceptance across a wide spectrum of industries.
To enable product integration into real-world RFID application systems, currently some RFID hardware vendors provide basic libraries or command sets as an interface/vehicle for their RFID readers or devices to interact with the anticipated application systems. However, for most cases these basic libraries or command sets only support low level APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). As these low level APIs handle a single task at a time, it normally takes a logically structured sequence of these low level APIs to perform a useful application level task. For instance, reading a data block at the application level may require a programmer to resolve anti-collision, to select an RFID tag and to access data stored on the selected RFID tag. Furthermore, as these low level APIs can vary greatly according to the specifics of RFID vendor hardware (e.g., vendor-specific RFID readers/writers and tags), application system programmers usually will have to relearn associated programming specifics whenever a different RFID vendor device has to be dealt with. As a result, the RFID application development process becomes correspondingly costly and time consuming while yielding systems that are typically non-portable. To make matters even worse, the actual deployment and operational evolution of many RFID application systems commonly encounter different kinds of vendor-specific physical RFID readers, writers and tags, or heterogeneous physical RFID devices and tags. Another phenomenon is that many of the currently deployed RFID applications are limited to desktop applications not yet in pace with the rapidly and continuously expanding base of network-coupled applications including the wireless environment wherein communication security can be critical. A list of relevant references is provided in APPENDIX-I and some of them are briefly discussed below.
Reference 12 (U.S. Pat. No. 6,768,419) and Reference 28 (US application #20040201479) entitled “Applications for radio frequency identification systems” describe the work flow of RFID applications associated with RFID devices and tags. In contrast, the present invention provides a system and method for efficiently developing and deploying RFID applications instead of the behavior of those RFID applications themselves.
Reference 9 (U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,121), entitled “RFID material tracking method and apparatus”, describes a system for automatically tracking items via RFID passive tags. It focuses on a mechanism to track massive RFID passive tags by using remote sensing antennas and RFID devices. On the other hand, our invention provides a system to help developing RFID software applications.
References 29 (US application #20040220897 entitled “System, method, and computer software product for instrument control and data acquisition, analysis, management and storage”) and 30 (US application #20040254840 entitled “Parking reservation systems and related methods”) each describes systems and methods to realize a particular RFID application. Detailed work flow and behavior of the application are presented to resolve problems encountered in a specific application domain. Hence, they are both different from our invention which provides a system to help developing and deploying general RFID software applications.